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Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

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Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#291

Post by madrox »

I wonder how much of the desire for kids to stream has to do with the potential scale. The bar to entry is low, but if you take off, then you're making six figures a month. Once upon a time, mobile apps had that kind of reputation. Before that, it was blogs. Before that, websites.

There always seems to be a gold rush whenever a market becomes democratized. The gold rush seems to end once organic acquisition is no longer viable. I'm curious if that follows some static cost-per-user marketing dollar amount across all of these trends.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#292

Post by retsibsi »

ryandrake wrote: post #272
cybwraith wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say not really. For one thing, the early days of gaming held onto many elements from arcades where games were meant to be consumed in somewhat bite-sized chunks (Atari, NES, etc). A big factor for multiplayer games is the somewhat modern obsession with matchmaking and character intro/pick screens. When I was a kid, I could hop into a game immediately for a 15-20 minute deathmatch session of Quake 1/2/3 in any…

> Quake Chanpions Don’t forget the 2-3 minutes it seems to take to even load the game. QC would be so much better if you could just load it (quickly) hop onto an already-playing game, and skip all the intros and statistics. How did a franchise like Quake backslide so badly?

I think the developer/publisher are just responding to market pressures.

Quake Live (at least for its first few years) was relatively pure and old-school, including in the ways mentioned in this thread, but it was only moderately popular and didn't seem to do well financially. The most (financially) successful modern games tend to focus a lot on extrinsic motivations to play -- including character progression, unlockables, gambling crates etc., but also things that give extra context to individual matches, like statistics and ranking points -- rather than just the core gameplay. People also have less tolerance for being the newbie who loses 100-0, and expect to be matched against players around their level.

Not all of these things are relevant to your question, but some of them help to explain the trend toward lobbies, matchmaking queues, and other obstacles to just clicking on a server list and jumping into a game.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#293

Post by s-shellfish »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #290
s-shellfish wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. I've been making art for a long time, went to school for it. People want to see themselves in whatever you produce for them. It's that simple. They want something they identify with. Artists and content developers can have more fun playing with it because they have different meaning spaces - they see connections across content that is still self identity, it's just across a different set of things. It can be…

> People want to see themselves in whatever you produce for them. It's that simple. Funny thing is comrade Tocqueville hit on that upon looking at the USA for a couple of months almost two centuries ago. Something along the lines of "democratic peoples want to hear stories about themselves" (instead of the classics), rather early on the pages of his Democracy in America, writing about theater and culture.

Now that I think about it though, it really depends. If there's no stable reflection of self identity, that's what people seek out. But if there is a stable way to identify with the self, people seek out novelty, something different.

I think the internet introduces both tunnel vision of self identity and complete chaos where self identity breaks down. This seems like it would be an obvious consequence of anonymity, but some things are easily forgotten.

It makes sense with the Democratic process. Identities constantly swapping and merging, playing both sides while being neither fundamentally. It makes sense that communism would have a valid criticism. Stable, forced sense of identity suppresses dissent before it manifests. Until revolution, war happens, that is. Scary stuff!

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#294

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

s-shellfish wrote: post #293
B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People want to see themselves in whatever you produce for them. It's that simple. Funny thing is comrade Tocqueville hit on that upon looking at the USA for a couple of months almost two centuries ago. Something along the lines of "democratic peoples want to hear stories about themselves" (instead of the classics), rather early on the pages of his Democracy in America, writing about theater and culture.

Now that I think about it though, it really depends. If there's no stable reflection of self identity, that's what people seek out. But if there is a stable way to identify with the self, people seek out novelty, something different. I think the internet introduces both tunnel vision of self identity and complete chaos where self identity breaks down. This seems like it would be an obvious consequence of anonymity, b…

Back in the old days of broadcast TV trying to hit peak audience, the voluntary sameness of the various broadcasters was scary ...

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#296

Post by CamelCaseName »

basica wrote: post #286
gitgud wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "if you build it, they will come" mantra from Field of Dreams is not applicable to a world where so much more content is being created than can possibly be consumed. This resonates with me deeply. I've always lived by that sentiment. It's also one of the reasons I love the points systems on Reddit and Hacker News, as it's the fairest way to objectively rank things people make, rather than by how much advertisin…

It's kind of broken though as most people will only view the most upvoted comments because once again there's just so much content it's impossible to view it all, so you upvote what's already been upvoted. If you're there first you generally will get a lot of karma even if better comments come later.

This is why new comments get put on top, and if after a decent amount of views, they don't garner enough upvotes, they sink.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#297

Post by [deleted] »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #294
s-shellfish wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that I think about it though, it really depends. If there's no stable reflection of self identity, that's what people seek out. But if there is a stable way to identify with the self, people seek out novelty, something different. I think the internet introduces both tunnel vision of self identity and complete chaos where self identity breaks down. This seems like it would be an obvious consequence of anonymity, b…

Back in the old days of broadcast TV trying to hit peak audience, the voluntary sameness of the various broadcasters was scary ...

[deleted]

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#298

Post by BigJono »

jrockway wrote: post #225
metalliqaz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a good explanation, however don't you find that you have to be a player of the game in order to enjoy watching it? Not being a MOBA player, I can never understand what is going on when watching games like DotA.

Depends on the game. I have watched Dota 2 games and have absolutely no idea what anyone is doing or why. I tried playing HOTS and even the tutorial couldn't explain to me what a MOBA is. I think a lot of Twitch is not competitive games like Dota or Overwatch and are really casual games that anyone can understand. I never played Portal 2 cooperative but can easily understand what's going on if someone is streaming it…

This is why I've always thought Rocket League would take off in a big way, it's as trivial to understand as most physical sports.

So far I've been proven wrong, but who knows, maybe it'll turn around.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#299

Post by _4ziu »

bumholio wrote: post #95
jcfrei wrote: post #17

Very interesting article. I have nothing substantial to add I just want to point out how "cyberpunky" the lives of some people have become. Twenty years ago this would have fit right into the storyline of a dystopian cyberpunk novel about poor streamers who spend all day in front of a computer screen trying to become the most popular "gamer in the online gaming community".

It's a story as old as the world: trying to get noticed while doing essentially the same thing as the successful kids, but lacking that essential element of luck or genetics, that last second on the chronometer, that "in" preexisting social circle. It's the life of all those trying to enter into high risk, highly coveted careers that afford celebrity: authorship, sports, politics, music or film. The field might be ch…

The problem is trying to do the exact same thing as someone else. There has never been a business or method of making money in the history of capitalism that has survived by being an exact copy of another business or method. Even businesses with the same model as a bigger one, eg: small vs large car repair businesses, are able to function by having a different pricing point, location, etc. No one seems to understand that this applies to your job too. You're never going to be as successful as someone else by doing the exact same thing as them, because they got there first. Find your niche.

Re: Twitch streamers who spend years broadcasting to no one

#300

Post by Alex3917 »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #235
_raoulcousins wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very frustrating for me. I like to watch skilled players who explain their startegy to improve my own game play, but streams are a slog to watch live. Some streamers archive their streams, but big chunks of their recordings are muted because they play copyrighted music. I know I'm in a tiny minority of people that watch streamers as a learning tool and not as a source of entertainment. No reason to cater to p…

> but big chunks of their recordings are muted because they play copyrighted music. It's ridiculous that Twitch mutes audio, even if it's only a few seconds. Fair use is being totally ignored.

> Fair use is being totally ignored.

It might be fair use for the streamer, but it almost certainly isn’t for Twitch.

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